Advancing African American Linguistics Symposium Saturday July 6th, 2019 10:00am Talking College Crew: Anne H. Charity Hudley, Mary Bucholtz et al. 10:30am Jamie Thomas 11:00am Minnie Quartey 11:30am John Baugh 12-1:30pm Break 1:30pm Michael Terry 2:00pm Aria Razfar, Joseph C. Rumenapp, Zayoni Torres 2:30pm Break 3:00pm Marlyse Baptista 3:30pm Sonja Lanehart 4:00pm Poster Session 4:30pm Reflection and Conclusions Sunday July 7th, 2019 9:00am Black Linguist Celebration 9:40am Angie Kortenhoven 10:00am Advancing African American Linguists Through Help with Publication 11:00am Advancing African American Linguists Through Help with Tenure and Promotion 12:00pm Advancing African American Linguists Through Networking 1:30pm Discussion of Future Meetings Talking College Talking College Crew Anne H. Charity Hudley, Mary Bucholtz, Jamaal Muwwakil, and deandre miles This presentation highlights language as a central factor in student preparation and academic and social success in higher education, particularly for African-American students and others from underrepresented groups. African-American graduate students and undergraduates conducted over 50 interviews with African-American undergraduate students at several Minority- Serving, Historically Black, and Predominantly White Universities, located in California, Maryland, and Virginia. Based on information collected from the interviews, we show how African-American and other culturally and linguistically diverse students must be supported and guided to meet the complex and varied linguistic expectations of higher education. In addition, African-American students often face linguistic bias and may need additional support and guidance as they navigate the linguistic terrain of higher education. Critical knowledge about language and culture is therefore an integral part of the quest for educational equity and empowerment, not only in K-12 but also in higher education. As a result, we also highlight information shared from additional interviews with African-American students who have taken courses in linguistics with us demonstrate the impact of education about language and culture on students’ academic opportunities and social lives. These findings serve to help us create a model of assessment for what linguistic information African-American students need in order to be successful in higher education and how faculty can help to establish pathways for students to access content about language, culture, and education within the collegiate curriculum. African American Linguists on Twitter Jamie A. Thomas, Swarthmore College For some years now, Twitter has fostered a digital space where linguists come together, and share data and queries often under the hashtags #lingtwitter or #academictwitter. African American linguists, however, claim additional unique space for the sharing of research and perspectives on racial inequality, sometimes with tweets inflected both visually (e.g., racialized GIFs) and linguistically (e.g., lexically, morphosyntactically) to reflect the contours of African American Language (AAL) (e.g., Green 2002). African American linguists additionally use the ‘retweet’ and ‘retweet with quote’ functions to circulate insights from popular and scholarly sources beyond linguistics, with the goal of illuminating how these sources and voices hold value for language and communication studies. Using an autoethnographic lens (Griffin 2012), I discuss my own participation within a network of African American and Black twitter users. Within a framework of multimodal critical discourse analysis (Yoon 2016), I analyze recent key examples of other African American linguists, as well as my own tweets, and responses to theirs (e.g., likes, retweets, comments). This illustrates how, in addition to #BlackTwitter, it may be understood that there is also a Black Linguist Twitter space (even if it is not popularly referred to as such) where AAL is formally and publicly celebrated by African American linguists. For example, note in (1) my use of “Dayum” as a way of casually approximating spoken inflection. Example (2) illustrates how another linguist offers a blistering critique of mainstream representations of AAL speech with a comment that describes major side-eye. Yet another linguist (example 3) draws upon insights from other fields of study to problematize the mainstreaming of Whiteness within linguistics. Example (1) Example (2) Example (3) “It used to be Chocolate City:” Examining local identities and change narratives through complex stancetaking and positioning in African American residents of Washington, DC Minnie Quartey, Georgetown University “Uh, city’s changing uh, gentrification. You know. It’s not Chocolate City…it’s Vanillavile. That’s what I call it now.” --Vern, (61-year old community health worker and DC native) This paper examines how African Americans in Washington, DC construct complex multifaceted identities through their connectedness and disconnection to the shifting racial and cultural landscape of the city by examining various stances (DuBois 2007) and positions (Davies and Harré 1990) to the city in narratives collected in recent sociolinguistic interviews. In the late 1950s after the Great Migration, DC’s population shifted and became majority African American. However, within the last decade, there has been another shift in the demographics of the city with the African American population under 50% for the first time in nearly 60 years with speakers referring to the fact that the city is no longer referred to “Chocolate City” but now “Vanillaville” or “Cappuccino City.” While there are two main contributing factors to the shift, gentrification and the exodus of the Black middle class, most speakers attribute the changes mostly to gentrification, and there are various perspectives on the effects of gentrification on the city. For some speakers, they believe gentrification is the root cause for relocation, displacement, and marginalization of the African American community in DC. For other speakers, they believe that gentrification is an opportunity to beautify the city and provide better opportunities. Socioeconomic status and access to social mobility (or lack thereof) appear to correlate with speakers’ positive and negative evaluative stances. The small stories (Bamberg and Georgakopoulou 2008) and narratives analyzed in this paper come from two corpora: the LCDC and CORAAL projects. The Language and Communication in Washington, DC project (LCDC) is a corpus of nearly 300 sociolinguistic interviews from residents in the Washington, DC metropolitan area. The Corpus of Regional African American Language English project (CORAAL) is the first publicly accessible corpus of AAL, and it is comprised of sociolinguistic interviews from regional AAL speakers. Ultimately this project highlights the complex and multifaceted construction of local identities and how the effects of gentrification manifests itself through each speaker’s lived experience. Situational Variation in African American English John Baugh, Washington University in St. Louis Labov et. al. (1968) employed “contextual styles” to evaluate informal-to-formal varieties of African American vernacular English (AAVE), by comparing a combination of phonological and morphophonemic variables that were produced by consultants who recorded interviews, read short passages which included key linguistic features, they recorded word lists, and they also recorded lists of minimal pairs (e.g. cot and caught or merry and marry). Dillard (1972), evaluating somewhat similar evidence, concluded that older African Americans used vernacular dialect features much less frequently than did younger speakers; that is, typically as spoken by males (resulting in a strong gender bias) between the ages of eight to eighteen. At that time, this age grading was interpreted as evidence of older African Americans gradually coming to adopt Standard English, whereas younger speakers were considered to be preserving the vernacular dialect, which, according to Bailey and Maynor (1988) and Labov and Harris (1983) resulted in a combination of linguistic and economic isolation that triggered greater linguistic divergence from Standard English. Bailey and Maynor (1985) also noticed linguistic innovations, particularly regarding the usage of habiltual /be/, that was previously unattested. These synchronic studies of AAVE were produced at a time when the historical legacy of the African slave trade was depicted by two camps: dialectologists, who emphasized the English origins of what was then depicted as “Nonstandard Negro English,” and the Creole hypothesis, which emphasized the African origins of the same dialect, which, in 1972, began to be referred to as “Black English (vernacular)” (Dillard, 1972; Labov, 1972). Terminological adaptation continued, with linguists adopting the term “African American vernacular English” during the 1980’s (Rickford 1987, Baugh 1988,) while other African American social scientists favored the term “Ebonics” (Williams 1975, Smith 1975). Despite differences in the ethnolinguistic orientation of the pertinent linguistic nomenclature, all of these studies were devoted to evaluations of linguistic usage by United States Slave descendants. Results for the current presentation consist largely of variable rule analyses of suffix /s/ variation based on situational contexts (i.e., plural /-s/, possessive /-s/ and third person singular /-s/), rather than Labov’s (1972) experimental contextual styles. The situations are